Do you guys remember that Edd, Ed & Eddy show on Cartoon Network? Ahh those were the days. Back in the early 2000s we Safricans had like 5 fricking channels on TV. SABC1 for Zulu, Sotho and Xhosa language orientated shows and news, SABC2 for Afrikaans orientated shows and news, SABC3 for English news and shows, Mnet for movies, E-TV for shows and movies, and maybe the dedicated afrikaans channel KykNet.
Like 6 channels, and they often had long periods where nothing were broadcasted, especially at night, and just white noise 
or darkness on the old projector screen (this was before the LED LCD flatscreens for you Zoomers 
), so the 6 channels were always a very limited source of entertainment in rural Sef efrica.
Pretty much everyone watched Survivor on SABC3 at 7-oclock on Tuesdays, and everyone watched the Mnet or E-TV movie on sunday nights 8pm. Imagine a whole fricking small rural farm town gossiping about the pirate Rupert having a dress and still kicking butt with his bushy beard, or all school students talking about the same James Bond movie which literally everyone watched, cuz it was either that or listening to your parents frick at night.
So when DSTV cable network came out in RSA, it was a monumental upgrade for most Safricans which bulldozed the previous channels which were local entities on their own. Almost 200 CHANNELS!!! And that was the days when those 200 channels actually mattered and wasn't just Ice Road Trucker spam and low effort storeroom auction crap investing daytime TV. 
Oh no bois, those 200 DSTV channels included shit like the Documentary channels, National Geographic, Discovery channel (The mythbusters channel!!), the Hitler....I mean the History channel, Animal Planet, the African Culture channel!!
Then there was a split in Mnet, with TWO movie channels which had 24/7 movies rotating the entire week every second of the day! Holy shit!. There was cooking channels, hobby channels, that one where How-It's-Made factory channel everyday. Old shit like Star Trek, Conan the Barbarian was showned on TCM channel for the very old boomer channels! (by the year 2000 standards).
There was a dedicated channel for news and shows for every Southern African country - Namibia, Lesotho, Swazi-Land, Mozambique, Zims, Botswanan Zambie and Angola - all in their local languages even.
You could literally come home after school at 1pm, cook your meal before schoolwork had to begin, and be garanteed to watch something worthwhile on one of the many DSTV channels, while you ate, and chatted to family about your school days. DSTV was a massive influx of Burger 
entertainment for the ruralcel who had nothing, not even internet.
If your friend had this weird NASA radio ufo thing installed in their wall, then man they would become popular, because the whole neighbourhood would come and be amazed at the absurd amount of entertainment for that moment in time.
But by far the most catching channel for kids and teens was the Cartoon Network channel. And endless stream of 24/7 cartoons night and day! I lived and breathed the Edd, Ed & Eddy shows, and my sister lived through the Powerpuff grils. 
Lots of fun 
But one episode which I remember for the Edd, Ed and Eddy show was the Fads one. Where the loveable idiots were always one fad behind their neighbourhoods and joined in on the fun. I saw this episode randomly on youtube the other day and it reminded me of a lot of Fads from my past in rural SA, but also their accompanying dramas 
It reminded me of the time of Tazos!
JAP SHIT INVADES SA SCHOOLS:
https://allafrica.com/stories/200010270196.html
A lot of fads would come and go, with many school children copying each other, and the impulse to join certain fads would spread like wildfires from school to school 
Whenever some schools had a sports event, like Rugby,Soccor, Netball or Cricket match with their neighbouring school or provincial events, then kids there would congregate and acquaintances would copycat stuff they felt were cool 
Like a virus spreading from one province to the next municipal region, kids (black, white or coloured) would suddenly breakout in a fever for a specific toy or game. In 2000, on the turn of the millenium, there would be a horde of kids begging their parents for pokemon - kids would become so infatuated with playing or trading Pokeshit merchandise that many SA schools would unironically fricking ban kids from bringing them to class, as they caused disruption!!
SIMBA CHIPS: 
Before we come to Tazos, we must discuss the Simba chips brand, once the most successful and ubiquetos brand in all of Southern Africa. In 2004, you could buy Simba Chips in Cape Town, in Windhoek Nambia, in Zimababwe, In mosambiue, Lesotho and Swazi-Land. They were everywhere and all because of their spectacular on point marketing.
Simba Chips saw the spectacular success which Jap merchandise in Jap chips had oversees, and deigned to copy that strategy in Southern Africa. They hardcore capitalized on kids being able to find Tazos (dont worry I'll come there in a moment) in their products, and bought massive amounts of TV advertising space to broadcast to the population their strategy of attracting kids to buy their brand of chips over others, as their would be a nice surprise inside them.
Kids would beg their parents for a pack of simba chips when they stopped at a petrol station, or when mom was busy buying the week's groceries, or they would buy Simba chips themselves in Tuckshops or Snoepies during school breaks. The point is that their jumping on Pokemon or Digimon or Dragonball Z or the latest anime bullshit, and advertising these Tazos in their chips, would be wildly successful and would propel the Simba brand to be everlasting in the South African conscience.
Now Simba was a moderately successful brand before the Tazo craze hit SA, but their utilizing the Tazo-fad, propelled them to infamy and lucrative financial success, it was deemed one of the most successful marketing campaigns in all of African economic history.
Simba still holds 63% of the entire SA crisps market.
Here is a short history of Simba Chips in the thickest Sef Efrican accent ever recorded:
SO WHAT EXACTLY ARE TAZOS?!
https://oversaturated.co.za/blogs/things-only-south-african-millennials-remember
Tazos were these generally flat disc or square shaped plastic pieces which featured characters or monsters from famous Japanese shows, they would either be tradable collectibles or work like those stat-challenge cards of trains and planes, where some had better or worse statistics, and would consequently win depending on the game.
The Pokemon Tazos were these round thick plastic discs, which had the monster's picture on one side, and their elemental power stats on the other, and they worked in a convoluted Rock-Paper-Scissors game, where water beat fire, and electricity beat water? I dont remember i was never a Pokemon fan.
But they were EXTREMELY popular the immediate moment when Simba ran their fad advertisement campaign, and their popularity spread with never before seen rapidity from school to school. Kids would see their peers at a visiting school play with these weird plastic Discs, and collect them from the Simba chips, and even see their peers gamble for them.
The Simba chips acted like random lootboxes, where certain types of Tazos were more rare than others, or came in seasonal waves, depending on which Jap season was aired that time. I recall the English translation of Pokemon was very well done and popular with kids, and thus anything pokemon related and consequently Pokemon Tazos - the very 1st Tazos. Unfortunately I never got a chance to care personally about Pokeshit, as their airing time conflicted with afterschool activities.
People would go apeshit in collecting these Tazos. A complete collection would be sold for hundreds to thousands of Rands at the time. A collection mania would follow many kids, and even more subdued people would have at least some amount of Tazos lying around in their playroom or Toybox, an incomplete collection of Pokemon DBZ and other shit. Even and especially poor black kids likened especially to Tazos as their great poverty usually prevented them from posessing expensive plastic toys like their Upper Middle Class white peers.
These tazos were toys which could be collected by just continuing to buy the same daily or weekly snacks from their food allowance, and Simba chips were very reasonably cheap back in early 2000s, and the fricking Rand still had buying power and value, before the ANC r*ped us all. Thus poor black kids in afrikaans or sotho schools would have an especially strong collectors mania for Tazos of various kinds.
Eventually as you guys can imagine, the fad wore off, or the population became saturated with Tazos to the point where even the rarest variants of Pokemon would have had a chance to be picked up by peple not looking for the collections as hard as the most hardcore collectors.
Even with a second season of Pokemon monsters released the mania wasn't as strong as the 1st. (Again I know basically nothing about Pokemon, so I cant comment on this). But Simba marketing was always on point at this stage, and pivoted to also release Tazos from OTHER Jap popular cartoons - this included Digimon and DragonBall Z. 
I personally was also not a big DBZ fan at all, so I dont recall the order in which they were released, but soon after Pokemon, Simba would release a new type of Tazo - these metal DBZ ones! Now they were especially popular with boys, especially black and coloured boys, who apparently watched DBZ religiously. Kids would play with these metal variants by betting a said amount, and trying to flip as many over by throwing them with other tazos like Pool or cards. Gambling with rare tazos was especially popular!
Later an even more compelling variant of DBZ tazos would be released - these time a square Tazo! 
Theser square Tazos were so designed, that they may be attached to one another and form dice! And the characters whom was the most powerful had the highest dice level, some even had a fricking seven 
on their size, as there was canonically 7 Dragonballs in the show or some shit lol. I personally like these Tazos the most of all because I liked building dice with nothing but fricking 7s on them lol!
Lots of fights would start because gambling with Tazos, using the Tazo dice would follow on the playground, and the highest dice scores would win - however when the loser realized his opponent had nothing but 7s on his fice, the fists would come flying lmoa 
https://www.bobshop.co.za/item/299917610/28_Dragonball_Z_Super_cubes_2_Free_Dragonball_Z_Cards.html
They are still sold on the 2nd hand collector's market in RSA today.
Simba or whoever thought about designing these Tazos were utterly ingenious - because as soon as the one seasonal Tazo craze fad seemed to be dying down, a new wave of tazos would be anounced by Simba - every 6 months a new exciting toy or collector's item to be found in your local Simba crisps - a cheap enough packet of chips in your local supermarket or petrol stop.
The next wave of Tazos would include these DBZ octagonal ones, which could be used to clip into one another, and basically act as building blocks for some kind lego or bionicle pieces!
https://old.reddit.com/r/southafrica/comments/gb0trg/i_still_have_my_tazos
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/392313060075
Apparently the above Tazos are from Australia so they must have also had Tazos!
https://spakatak.com/tazos/australia
SAFRICANS SIGN PETITION FOR SIMBA TO RE-RELEASE TAZOS:
https://www.change.org/p/simba-chips-simba-tazo-s
Tazos are still sold to this day on 2nd hand online and IRL markets, by relatives who clean their dead husband's room and finds a hidden stack of old Tazos, or springclean the room of their 30 year old manchild, and sells the crap away.
https://www.valueforest.co.za/action.php?view=grid&key=tazos
TAZOS WERE RELEASED INTERNATIONALLY:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tazos
A whole host of countries saw the release of Tazos, in their local respective brand of chips or crisps.
TAZO DECLINE IN SOUTH AFRICA 
Post 2005-2006 Tazos would rapidly decline from RSA as a fad, after 5 golden years of popularity. This apparently was a global trend as well. For SA there was a myriad of reasons.
1st - the Simba company had deemed them too costly to import or construct and package. The amount of saves attributed because of Tazos alone had decline by the 2nd half of the 2000s and, and thus a clear market indication of their declining popularity amongst kids, regardless of what show they represented - Pokemon and DBZ were both falling out of view.
2nd - A series of South Africans have had close calls after choking on Tazos, because they carelessly didn't read the advertising strip on the Simba packet, and didn't expect a hard plastic or metal disc they were swallowing and consequently would choke near death. This would happen dozens of times in South Africa, especially with small kids, especially small black kids who were given chips to eat by Sotho mothers who literally could not read English 
Old people with sensitive teeth and gums, would get hurt after carelessly chewing a hard piece of plastic or metal, and despite the craze on Tazos by children, a still large enough part of the SA population would be completely unaware of the Simba brand or its Tazos.
The ANC government was also actually somehow managing to squeeze legislation through parliament which actually benifitted Safricans, like increased Health and Safety standards in sold foodstuffs, and ruling against hazardous food being sold. Simba would fear this legislation would become much more broad, and in combination with the increasing tales of choking incidents, Simba quietly discontinued the Tazo scheme in their chips, just before a deadly incident might occur in which they could be sued, where they felt especially vulnerable with new regulatory legislation making its way through parliament.
3rd - Parents and schools were also beginning to lodge complaints about the Tazos causing disruption, and the collectors craze causing kids to spend their parents' money to buy exorbitant collections. More schools were beginning to ban Tazos, as "beheerliggaams" or school exterior regulatory bodies (consisting of Karens and busybody moral police parents) would b-word about Tazos being Satan and the cause of all their children's unruliness (and not their shit parenting).
Unfortunately most of these events were recorded in fricking local newspapers, in an era where internet and online publications and articles are very rare, so I could not for the life of me find any sources, no matter how much I searched, or which search-engine I used 
Google fricking sux donkey ballz and keeps trying to sell me Tazos from Gumtree and other 2nd hand shops 
Few of those newspapers even exist anymore, many closed as they could not compete against the internet era - hells bells, it's like internet link-rot, except for information about real world events by physical newspapers. I could not even find a singular example about the simba Chips in their original forms from 2000-2006 when they had these strips attached to their front, indicating and advertising their tazos inside.
Probably no such singular photo or image exists, as few South Africans had phones or cameras to capture the event. 
so i can only give you guys my word on this last chapter, I literally can find no proof of these events on the fricking internet.
Anyways that's all I got, Good night! Here's some frooooooogs
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
oh shit, i remember those lol
later in like the mid-late 2000s they came back but instead with AFL players on them in australia for some reason
im not sure why i read it all but its a good read to be honest
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context